CityLife

Sex with Robots: Joker

ALTHOUGH primarily known as a venue for bands and more indie-orientated nights, like most of us, The Roadhouse plays host to a dark side and just when you least expect it this venue comes through with some of the city’s most entertaining and successful club nights.

My first encounter was the late and great Soul:tion events and more recently Contort Yourself has been snowballing into your weekly nights out.

But this evening, the spotlight was pointed at the night known has Sex With Robots.

Starting off some years back, Sex With Robots began life as a weekly Tuesday night outing at The Roadhouse and throughout it’s time has slowly built up to the weekend mantel and rightfully so, with the events doors opening at 11pm and reaching full capacity by midnight, an achievement on its own, let alone outside of term time.

The SWR residents welcomed the steady stream of punters into the basement and proceedings where soon handed over to Manchester’s rising star, Illumsphere.

This local lad has laid the ground roots of what is set to be a promising and successful career. 

Bringing his usual blend of trip hop, hip-hop and dubstep of the left field variety, he kept the crowd bouncing and treated us to a splattering of grime here and there and some of the bigger tracks in hip-hop from both side of the pond, more than likely owing to the crowd's younger than usual age range.

After being treated to a longer than usual set from Illumsphere, the nights main event stepped up to the turntables, Joker.

Hailing from Bristol, which seems to be a melting pot of talent these days, Joker produces both dubstep and grime and has carved his own niche sound into both.

Instantly the sound levels became deeper and the bass bins went on the offensive against the crowd.

Spinning his way through, many dub plates and VIPs of his own tracks Joker cleverly infused them with classics from Skream, bangers from Benga and other offerings from the cream of 2009’s releases.

Unfortunately, the second half of Joker's set took a turn for the worst and one too many cheesy anthems and sing-a-long bootlegs for this listeners liking were played.

That aside, the night spoke for itself, with a constant queue of people trying to get in until 1am and a busy dancefloor throughout the night, it seems Sex With Robots is steadily on the way to concreting itself as one of the few club nights in The Roadhouse’s hall of fame.

These guys make their second weekend outing at the end of August with Warp Records Rustie headlining, if tonight was anything to go by arrive early to avoid disappointment!

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